"X" Review

The year is 1979, the place is a farmhouse in Texas. Maxine (Mia Goth) is an aspiring superstar and cokehead accompanied by her older boyfriend Wayne (Martin Henderson), about to make a high class pornographic film . Their cinematographer/cameraman is RJ (Owen Campbell), his quiet girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) is the sound girl, Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) is his confident leading lady, and Vietnam veteran Jackson (Scott Mescudi) his leading man.
They settle into the farmhouse of an elderly couple and get to work. But there is something about these people which just seems off, and Wayne never told them exactly what they were doing here. So if they find out, there may be some trouble...

This movie fucking rules.
I went into this knowing absolutely nothing, save that it was the new Ti West - which is enough. Ti West always crafts his movies as love letters to 70s and 80s horror flicks, far more of the former in this case (though I get ahead of myself), and has very much done the same here. He's a meticulous craftsman with a great eye and sense of fun.
The build up is excellent, the setting superb. Little details like the way shots will flicker in between transitions as if a few frames are misplaced, just really add to the tone as well as the dread - in the case of a superb sequence at a lake.
The build up is long, using a lot of shots to show off his skill and add tension and dread. There's one of the barn at night which could be straight out of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the aforementioned fucking fantastic lake/pond sequence (when the dread really begins to ratchet up); the film is what West does best: building dread and atmosphere.
I'll take this moment to say that the editing in this movie is the best I have seen in years, it's got amazing transitions and top tier cuts. The comparisons and contrasts between the porn movie and the events around them are just the beginning, the use of Christian preachers on the television truly elevate it all. If you have the vaguest interest in editing, watch this.
When it all inevitably kicks off, the bloodbath is fun. You know it's going to be a slasher movie, WE know it's going to be a slasher movie, WEST knows it's going to be a slasher movie, so he sets out to craft one perfectly and make you work for it.
I'll also add that I like the performances here: Henderson could easily have just played it as sleazy, but honestly makes Wayne kind of lovable! What was the last thing you saw Henderson in? If I have a flaw with the movie, it's that Ortega is truly excellent and I wish she was in it more...
If you enjoy gore flicks or 70s horror then you'll know if you like this or not.
Personally speaking, this felt like a far better love-letter and homage to horror and the films of old than something like "Scream" or "Cabin in the Woods".

"Red Rocket" Review

A burnt-out, aging porn star by the name of Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) returns battered and bruised to his backwater hometown in Texas. Down on his luck and desperate to climb back up the ladder into the industry that made him what he is, he stays at the home of his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss). With only his charm and his once good looks, he attempts to find a way back in, and comes across a young woman named Strawberry (Suzanna Son) who may just be his meal ticket...

This is a wonderfully well observed and seedy little examination of the underbelly of a forgotten industry; and a character study of a complete and utter leech whom we should run for the hills for the moment we see him, yet cannot help but like him and and be endeared by his charm, which makes him all the more dangerous.
Set against the backdrop of the 2016 US Presidential election, this film is all run down industry, dead end towns, poor people and as a result is actually a lot better and far more honest at depicting the cultural divide in America than many of the hamfisted attempts to capture it in more "political" films. There's an awesome opening shot with Mikey contrasted with the fading, dying industry of Texas, and the whole film continues to have these gorgeous moments like that. My favourite image was of the characters smoking cigarettes with American flag wallpapers continuously over the course of the film. I'll let that sink in for a moment and all that it entails...

Yet for all of its impressive work, it's still a gritty and ugly movie at heart, in the best possible way. Think of this as a prequel to "Star 80" (brief side note: WATCH STAR 80!) and you're going to know what you are in for.
This is, at its core, a movie about a truly despicable leeching piece of shit clinging to the coat tails of anything he can to get by.
And I kind of love him.
Simon Rex is one HELL of a find here, and praise is also going quite rightly to Suzanna Son, who is also excellent in this.
I thought this movie was a really fun, genuinely funny examination of a desperate person clinging to fame in the "land of opportunity" at any cost.

"The Duke" Review

In Newcastle, the year is 1961 and Kempton Bunton (national treasure Jim Broadbent) is on trial for the theft of The Portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Francisco De Goya. We flashback to Bunton's life leading up to the theft: his hard working and long suffering wife Dorothy (Helen Bloody Mirren, excellent), his long-standing socialist crusades against injustice and the establishment, his sons Jackie and Kenny (Fionn Whitehead and Jack Bandeira), and his frustrations at the world around him.

This was a perfectly pleasant, sweet, but not-too-saccharine, little kitchen sink drama with well observed and lovely performances from Broadbent and Mirren. I could happily just have the two of them noodling and pottling about their home trading barbs with each other.
Whilst the heist itself is not particularly thrilling, it is not attempting to be: it's attempting to be an amiable little film about a nice man and his struggle.

"The Batman" Review

In the city of Gotham, Mayor Don Mitchell Jr (Rupert Penry-Jones, for some fucking reason) is murdered on Halloween. His murderer leaves a riddle which mystifies the police, including Lieutenant Jim Gordon (gold mine owner Jeffrey Wright), and it falls to the 2-year vigilante Batman (Robert Pattinson) to solve the mystery, putting him into the orbit of "The Riddler" (Paul Dano, more on him later...) and his murderous plot against the worst of the worst...
Okay... So... Where do I begin?

There is a lot of aesthetically pleasing, Gothic, baroque shots which feel right at home in "Batman", and it aims for a brooding tone. Particular favourites still fresh in my mind are Catwoman dropping down into a crime scene. There is a recurring voyeuristic, almost perverse way of shooting things: lots of POV shots, characters framed through windows and the like - I like it. It's kind of cool, and it is trying to tie into a theme and idea. And there is a lot of the Batman stuff people will get a kick out of: Carmine Falcone (John Turturro, ALWAYS welcome, even in a "Transformers" movie) shows up, the story pinches bits and pieces from "The Long Halloween", "Year One", Hush" and even "No Man's Land" for some unholy reason, but I get ahead of myself.
The Batman suit, if that's your jam, looks cool enough, and is even fucking bulletproof here, and Reeves does add some fairly good fight sequences: despite a rather bravura sequence at a stadium towards the end, my favourite was the one illuminated by gunfire in a corridor head-on. In another movie it would seem hacky and out of place, but for a "Batman aesthetic" it works, even if everything is too fucking murky and dark, and not for effect. It works for a while early on, as Batman is monologuing about being in the shadows, and criminals flinch from them in a fairly fitting opening sequence, but when trying to be a mystery movie, full of clues and intrigue, you need to be able to see these clues, and hear what is going on: maybe don't have every single character mumble or growl their dialogue or (in the case of Dano, I'm getting to you) have them talk through a mask which muffles every word. They have taken the wrong lessons from "The Dark Knight Rises" and Christopher Nolan's sound mixing in general...
The Bat-Mobile I guess is a kind of cool rocket car. But it also highlights the tonal issues the film has: Batman is inherently silly, and needs to embrace that angle of it, or go full-on Goth baroque ludicrousness. There are times it attempts this (Falcone's office looks like the city of fucking Rapture, which is fantastic) and there are some flashes of brilliance (the aforementioned shots, and parts where thugs promptly shit themselves upon discovering that Batman is bulletproof, and run away) but when you throw in a rocket car chase with a disfigured crime boss called "Penguin" and have a bulletproof man ninja-kicking rejects from "The Warriors", it can throw a wrench in the class system serial killer story you are trying to tell.

Alright, I've danced around it enough. There are spoilers here (arguably there are spoilers already, but you know, Stephen King once said that a good story cannot be spoiled), so maybe make yourself a cup of tea or watch the Adam West "Batman" series or look up who Rupert Penry-Jones is... okay? Got it?

The film is juggling two or three different things, which is fine (Heaven forbid my movie be ABOUT stuff!), but its central issue is poorly sketched: the mystery of The Riddler's plot is underbaked and takes a sideline to... brooding? It threatens to soar when it has Batman solving clues at crime scenes, uncovering things that the police missed, solving riddles and the like, and encountering suspects in both guises, but these are few and far between. And tying it into "Bruce Wayne" and the "Wayne Family" with a half-concocted backstory cribbed from the Wikipedia notes for "Hush" is a bold choice which doesn't quite pay off.
There is also the issue of the brooding and the themes themselves. This isn't a Zack Snyder situation: Reeves has talent as a film maker.

(Pictured: Zack Snyder's ouevre.)
But they aren't developed, the film makers (correctly, I must add) assume that we kow who Batman is and what he's about, but instead of developing on that, assume that this takes the place of backstory. He is placed as a contrast to the cynical Catwoman (an excellent Zoe Kravitz) but his ideas and world views are not quite explored, we are only ever put into his headspace in one admittedly quite creepy scene where he creates a conspiracy board on the floor and, unkept and barely dressed, he obsesses over the puzzles with his black eyeliner still on. Again, the visuals go a long way to compesating for many parts. Some will prefer these renditions of the characters, is all I'm saying before angry Batman fans pour into my mentions (who am I kidding? Nobody reads this), but insofar as what the film is "about"? Well that's where we get a little wonky...
Dano's Riddler is attacking the wealthy and elite of Gotham. Fine, gottcha, good, I like this plan and understand this plan. Dano is having some fun with the part (when he's allowed to be in the movie, and when he's not muffled by a weird mask that makes him look like Slipknot's fan club president with the budget of 8 quid) right until the film makers tell him what they actually want:

The Riddler is a cunning, brilliant, flamboyant mastermind who wants to prove he is smarter than Batman. He is NOT the cult-like overused shitsack paint-huffing scrotum tearingly overused ballache that is "The Joker". The film makers could not fucking help themselves, they had to do it, they HAD to try and tie it all into Joker and his "deep meaning" (if I see a Batman movie which does not include the fucking Joker in any way, shape or form: I'm going to personally give that script-writer a handjob). Using "The Dark Knight" as their base (it's an inevitable comparison, I'm sorry. Please reset your clocks) has really given them some poor ideas as to what the Riddler is supposed to be...
Oh right, themes and plots and the mystery... A good mystery, I have said many may many times, you can figure out in the first 20 minutes if you're particularly clever, because the main characters have the exact same information that you do and merely look at it differently. This one... never comes together. They catch him, he's some fucking guy, he reveals his backstory as an orphan in Thomas Wayne's orphanage programme, he hates the rich. Cool. Great. Then he delivers a rather cringe-worthy "We're the same Batman! You and me!" speech in his cell-
OH I have to give this tangent because FUCK: so early on Police Commissioner Trevor from Eastenders is yelling at Gordon for allowing Batman to come onto the crime scene, and gives the really clunky line "I let you get away with this because we have some history" and I dunno, that just really made me laugh. That's the kind of shit I'd write, and there are never quite as many amazingly clunky lines as that again... it's a shame...
Anyway, they catch the Riddler, and STILL add an hour's worth of runtime because they want to have another action scene, I guess? And have the Riddler turn the city into a chaos fuelled wasteland which kills and harms the poor because... wait wasn't this about fighting the rich and corrupt? They're fucking fine mate, they've got fucking skyscrapers and live on hills and shit! And don't give me that "he's insane" shtick!
Also he's put into Arkham SUUUUPER quickly after being captured. That's not me nitpicking (well it is) but it just made me giggle. A couple of scenes are like that. I dunno it just flicks between wanting to be grim dark serious and Gothic noir, so those two styles mesh weirdly...
And in one final "Josh can go fuck himself" moment: they couldn't fucking resist.
They could not FUCKING resist it, could they?
The Joker is in this.
FUCK.
OFF.
DO.
A
NEW
THING.
Fucking Christ. And don't give me that "Sherlock and Moriarty" business - you know how many stories Moriarty was in? Fucking 2.
I've gone through a lot of nitpicking and structural issues (that entire last hour can get in the fucking bin) but if you like your Batman mythos and aesthetic, I reckon you'll like it.
Maybe I'm just sick and fucking tired of fucking "grim noir" Batman movies...
Oh, and Paul Dano DOESN'T get beaten up! That's a win!

I don't use the word "pretentious" a lot, as I find it reductive and overused (like The Joker, to be fair...) but here I think it applies.
I know that a lot of wankers are going to dislike it (Ben Shapiro has already shat out a Tweet about it) for terrible reasons, so please, in advance, don't pool me in with them: this has nothing to do with "wokeness" (whatever that even means) or "they got this costume wrong", it's my terrible thought process on a movie.
I find it kind of sad I have to state that, with how toxic discourse about movies has become...

"Cyrano" - Review

A retelling of the classic play by Edmond Rostand, "Cyrano" tell the tale of its titular flamboyant, dashing, panache-fuelled character (Peter Dinklage) and his pining for his dearest, oldest friend Roxanne (Haley Bennett), who unfortunately falls for the handsome and kind, but all too awkward, Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr). Cyrano comes up with the idea to feed Christian his poetry and panache, in order to woo Roxanne, from afar! But aside from their plan, further complications arise when De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), a powerful nobleman, also has his eye on Roxanne...

Peter Dinklage is absolutely fantastic. This is the sort of part he can play in his sleep, and he takes to this like a fish to water. Honestly he reminds us why he is such an excellent actor, and it is refreshing to see him escape from the shackles of "Game of Thrones". He carries this film on his shoulders, particularly very early on when he cements that wit and brilliance of the character with his rap battle against an actor at the start, setting the tone for what he'll be doing here.
And it is a classic story, with good reason, worth it solely for him. The staging is immaculate, the costuming gorgeous, the colour sumptuous.
It's also a musical.
And the music is quite nice, not quite as catchy and brilliant as something like "In the Heights" or "West Side Story", with highlights being a song partway through blending the voices of our three leads, and a heart-breaking, soaring song by soldiers in the third act.
Watch it for Dinklage, stay for the sweet retelling of the fairy tale, and leave thinking that Mendelsohn was re-enacting a music video for "The Cure" in his sequence.